Thankfully No Man’s Sky isn’t actually deleting your discoveries

No Man’s Sky has suffered a difficult weekend. On top of reports pointing towards some services offering no questions asked refunds on the game, many players were shocked to discover a core part of the already severely limited title to be completely broken. It seemed that No Man’s Sky was deleting player-made discoveries and naming changes, which took a lot of the sting out of already bland exploration.

Popping up first on Reddit (and via ShackNews), several No Man’s Sky players were journeying back to some of their starting systems, only to discover that they had been reverted back to their original states. No animal, plant or planet name changes had been saved, which made user Dark_Nexis question what the point of the feature was in he first place.

“I check a few neighbouring stars I discovered and their discovers were wiped. So none of my named animals plants were ever saved. The system name and planet names were saved but everything else was wiped.”

He wasn’t the only player noticing this, and soon the Reddit thread was full of player complaints and theories as to why this might be happening. While some thought it was just a bug, others (myself included) theorised that it had to do with design instead. How No Man’s Sky is storing all this data is a mystery, so the game might have been deleting some of it in order to conserve space. Turns out the former was on the money.

A few hours later, Dark_Nexis reported back that his discoveries were appearing once again, and that the issue had completely resolved itself. It seems like that when he happened to go back the servers were under strain, delaying or otherwise breaking the data fetching required to repopulate his planets with his discoveries. Thankfully the issue eventually disappeared, calming some of the anger around yet another feature that was thought to have been smoke and mirrors.

“It seems a little bugged where as you get further and further away from your starting point you can’t see your old discoveries even when you find your way back. It’s like the server lags behind big time and takes a while to find the old information.”